What if Nintendo had lost the King Kong lawsuit? A review from another reality.

Cover Story: What if Nintendo had lost the King Kong lawsuit? A review from another reality.

I

don't know if you're old enough to remember Donkey Kong, but I am. You don't really hear much about DK these days. He's been all but expunged from the annals of game history, and the tiny handful of arcade cabinets and Coleco carts that weren't destroyed back in the '80s remain a rare commodity traded among truly dedicated game collectors (quietly and in private forums, since eBay and other online auction houses instantly cancel all DK-related transactions at Universal's behest).

I miss DK. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking, but I always felt his games -- regardless of how derivative or illegal the character himself may have been -- demonstrated a lot more creativity than the King Kong games we've seen ever since the lawsuit that outlawed him. Any student of video game history knows the story there, of course: It was one of the landmark events that helped shape the industry's early days. A plucky little Japanese company called Nintendo created a fun platform-climbing game starring a carpenter named Mario as he attempted to rescue his love Pauline from the clutches of an ape called Donkey Kong. Not a very subtle reference, but that's homage for you. Universal Studios didn't share that gee-whiz sentiment, though, and they brought the full freight-train force of the Hollywood legal system to bear on Nintendo, claiming infringement on the King Kong trademark. The tiny game company never stood a chance.

I've read speculation that Nintendo could have made a case that King Kong had entered the public domain. In fact, some historians argue that Universal didn't actually have the rights to King Kong anymore, and that their lawsuit was unfounded. All of that may be, but it didn't do much good for Nintendo, which Universal quickly absorbed and transformed into its game-making arm. Nintendo used to make some pretty clever games back in their solo days -- remember Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda on the cool but short-lived Nintendo Entertainment System? -- but you'd never know it based on Universal Nintendo's current output.

You'd never know Mario was meant to be the same character who leapt across cheerful blue skies to a calliope tune in Super Mario Bros.

Take Mario vs. King Kong, for example. In a perfect world, MvKK would be a return to form for the Mario games. After all, Universal's most popular game mascot got his start battling a character who looked suspiciously similar to King Kong before striking off in a completely different direction. More to the point, MvKK is basically a remake of the outlawed arcade game Donkey Kong, taking the Mario concept back to small, self-contained stages revolving around jumping and climbing, and away from the melee combat and first-person shooting arenas he occupies these days. MvKK is a sort of puzzle platformer, where each level comprises a single screen of the PlayStation Vita and can be solved entirely with the tools and techniques contained therein.

The problem with MvKK is that it's terrible. It has no soul. Again, this may simply be childhood nostalgia talking, since I haven't been able to touch the game in 25 years, but I remember the original Donkey Kong being a lot of fun. I also seem to recall it being loaded with personality. Even with those simple visuals, Kong beat his chest and grimaced and basically mugged hilariously as he taunted the player. Even Mario was memorable, with the squeaky little noise his shoes made as he ran and the triumphant tune that played as he grabbed a hammer to smash barrels.

There's none of that here. This Kong goes through the motions of his silver-screen counterpart -- literally, given that the developers simply dropped in stop-motion footage from an 80-year-old movie -- but it feels expectedly canned and lifeless. And Mario feels incredibly out of place. He retains the gritty, visceral appearance he's sported in recent titles like Mario's Killstreak Arena and Mushroom Kingdom Warfighter -- you'd never know he was meant to be the same character who leapt across cheerful blue skies to a calliope tune in Super Mario Bros., and seeing such a realistic character solving colored-door puzzles in a race against archival footage of a claymation monkey really looks ridiculous. If there were a word to describe MvKK, that word would be "slapdash."

The game itself is no great shakes, either. I know Universal Nintendo meant for MvKK to be a sly nod to Mario's origins, but just because the game it's based on consisted of only four simple levels that looped endlessly doesn't mean this one should, too. The old-school arcade mentality worked when you were dropping a quarter into a machine for five minutes of entertainment, and I hate bringing the value argument into a review, but a premium-priced $50 Vita game should offer much more than this. Yes, you gain new skills and weapons during subsequent loops, but we've all seen Mario blast Goombas into bloody chunks with an M-16 a million times in dozens of annualized sequels in each of his six "core" franchises. The amusement has long since faded, and even the final challenge -- a bloody knife fight with Kong whose primary appeal comes from seeing Mario's trademark "realistic wound-decal" technology applied to a classic movie monster -- is the most joyless exercise in Z-grade Street Fighter knockoffs since the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4. It sucked there; it sucks here. If Universal's long-term plan is to undermine the integrity of every single classic character in its stable -- which seems likely after that weird crossover game where Sonic the Hedgehog turned into the Wolfman -- this release puts them well on their way.

I'd say the game is a disgrace, but this is exactly the sort of mediocrity we've come to expect from the Mario series. I still don't understand how the franchise remains so popular, but all MvKK made me do is pine for the days before Universal consumed Nintendo and began churning out easy, lowest-common-denominator tripe based on a character I remember being pretty fond of as a kid. King Kong is no Donkey Kong, that's for sure. It makes me wonder what happened to the original Nintendo people, the ones who made all those fun games in the '80s. Surely they're not behind this mess. Supposedly the original designer of Mario became an art teacher somewhere in Japan. If that's true, I hope the guy never sees this artless mess -- surely it would break his heart to find his hero went the way of other fallen '80s greats like Pitfall Harry and Q*Bert.

1UP editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish misses the old Nintendo arcade games he played growing up. He's pretty sure the only good thing to come from the Universal takeover was Jack Black in the lead role of Peter Jackson's Mario vs. King Kong.

Universal Studios really did sue Nintendo for what it claimed was a character that infringed on its King Kong property. Luckily for Nintendo, canny barrister Howard Lincoln managed to unearth the fact that Universal's claim was groundless: King Kong had long since passed into the public domain, and Universal's ownership was suspect at best. Which isn't to say Donkey Kong hasn't been plagued by other rights issues....

Comments (29)

Interesting take

That is an interesting article speculating such an alternate reality :D

Yet, my theory would be a different one: if Nintendo had lost the lawsuit, there would have been no video games at all today -- there would have been no Mario, let alone his arch-rival in the 90's, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Shigeru is an important figure that changed the course of the video game history.

....

I find it amazing that the 1up staff can take the time to enter FAKE games (Mario Vs. King Kong) into the game finder data base so stories like this can have links placed throughout yet they can't seem to find the time to enter REAL games, such as 99% of the original Game Boy tiles into this same data base...

*sigh*

Anyone remember?

There's actually a couple easter eggs from the old, unfortunately named, King Kong Kountry games that I remember from when I was a kid.

In KKK2 there was a screen that showed Universal Nintendo's most popular video game characters in 1st, 2nd and 3rd place; Earthworm Jim, Sonic and Digitized Bela Lugosi, respectively. But if you look in the bottom corner you can see a red hat, which many assume was a nod by some of the leftover team that worked on the original Mario games, telling everyone that their hero was truly done. On top of that, there is a red neck-tie that many believe was going to be Donkey Kong's signature look before the concept was stolen for use by King Kong. Though why they felt the need to further dress up KK with those sunglasses and the Fido Dido brand shirt for his 16-bit era titles is still confusing.

Lol

The best of the 1Up's What if series. Like a David vs Goliat battle and how some US companies do business by absorving others companies or products. A tale of every-day but still funny and quite curious point of view.

I hope someone at 1Up is writing about "What is Nintendo would actually release the CD-Rom device for the old SNES?"

Amazing article and thanks for 1up's new direction!

I just had to say that after reading the blog Jeremey, and of course I read it in it's entirety yet didn't comment, I am SO happy with what the team is doing at 1up. I love these "what if" series and anything else creative to do with what videogamers love the most (games). I really hope the investors don't hate on this, and I hope the fellow 1up users support the website even more so they don't shoot down great ideas like this again in the future!.

Great job 1up and keep it up. I haven't been this excited to visit 1up since the days when you guys still had EGM. Kudos

this is so ridiculous

just how deep in the pockets of Apple are you, mr parish? you haven't given a mario game better than a C- since Mushroom Kingdom Warfighter 2, and THAT you only gave a B+, even though it's widely regarded as one of the best Super Playstation games ever made!!

Does anybody else remember . . .

The old Sega Playstation game "Mario is Missing" where you could switch between Mario's brother Giovanni or his fiancee Lady while you searched through Dracula's castle for Mario? There was a big marketing push that focused on the fact that they had a digital version of Bela Lugosi in it (like Orson Wells in Sky Captain, though I think this game did it first). What was that horrible line Vampire Mario said just before the last battle? "I never drink . . . vino." Something like that.

This current push by Universal to fuse their old movie franchises with their video game IP's is just history repeating itself. It was a bad idea in 1996 with Mario is Missing, and it's a bad idea now. If they would focus their efforts on their "unannounced" project for the new Atari Leopard instead of shoveling out rehashes of old properties on a candy-colored handheld for 5th graders, I'd take them much more seriously.

Haha

'Twas beauty that killed the beast...

I'm taking this article way too seriously, but the whole "Universal shuts down eBay auctions of old video games"-bit takes me out a little. Just a little. Nitpicks aside, great article, now to go read the rest of these.

How so?

eBay has caved to publisher and manufacturer pressure on more than one occasion. They used to disallow sales of all Dreamcast import software, even after the system was dead. Quashing a certain kind of classic game isn't a stretch at all.